


Downtime and Upkeep.

by orphan_account



Category: Dark Fate - Fandom, Terminator (Movies), Terminator Dark Fate, Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: F/F, Non-Sexual, Potentially offputting medical stuff, medical caretaking, scifi medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24028636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: From the Prompt Meme:https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Terminator_Dark_Fate_Prompts/requests"Would love some hurt/comfort style stuff of Grace being taken care of by Dani in the immediate aftermath of her surgeries."
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Downtime and Upkeep.

**Author's Note:**

> There are some potentially unpalatable elements to the extent Dani takes care of Grace and her body in this. Be warned.
> 
> If you'd prefer something light and sexy instead, try https://archiveofourown.org/works/23781268
> 
> I will be orphaning this right away, so apologies in advance for any typos or spelling errors. Feel free to recommend/translate/fanwork etc.
> 
> Feedback always means a lot though and I will see it. Thanks for reading.

The first thing she hears is Dani’s voice. The Commander. The Commander’s alive. She’s alive.

“Don’t panic, it’s okay.”

The first thing she feels… is panic. Of course it is. Everything feels wrong, all at once.

The most shocking thing is her breathing. Or rather, _the_ breathing. Air is forcing itself into her lungs, and they're expanding around it. Her breathing isn't hers, it is something that is being done to her. It’s frightening and unnatural and her body revolts against it, but either it’s too strong or she’s too weak, and her resitance makes no difference. She struggles against it instinctively, uselessly, as Dani tries to calm her.

“Shh, don’t. A machine has been helping you breathe, that's all, it’s okay. You’re safe.”

It takes a few seconds for the words to make sense. She tries to will herself calm, but even as she struggles to adjust to the awful, alien feeling of ventilator, of receiving breath as a machine dictates, she becomes aware of a half dozen other intrusions and impositions of her body; the fact she can’t move, the fact she can’t open her eyes, the way her body feels stronger and weaker in different ways than she remembers. She can also feel she’s on a padded surface, lying on her left side. That means she is being cared for, and that whatever is happening, she is somewhere safe. She tries to concentrate on that, on Dani, and to block everything else out.

“Don’t try to move. You are strapped down, so you can’t hurt yourself. Try to keep calm, I’ll explain everything.”

Dani’s voice means it’s okay. Dani’s voice means she can calm down. Even now she understands that much. She feels a hand on her shoulder, Dani’s hand, and that makes the difference.

It takes effort, but after a minute she does gets herself mostly under control. She has no choice.

Still, it’s easier than it should be, considering how much she’s having to understand at once.

“You’re still a little sedated, and you’re on some muscle paralytics for the machine. Don’t try to speak. You’re in my rooms, I had them bring you here after the surgery to take care of you.”

The surgery.

Of course. She’s starting to remember.

They were at the South Tunnel. Attack. She needed to get Dani safe. She was trying to when she was hit, badly, bleeding out. She volunteered for the surgery to the first medic she saw. For Dani, so she could keep Dani safe.

Those are the last clear things she can remember, though she understands on some vague level that all happened quite some time ago.

Dani’s hand soothes up and down her arm, and she starts to get her bearings. There is a tube down her throat, the breathing tube. There is a slimmer tube running down the back of her throat, through her nose – this must be a feeding tube. They are uncomfortable, and she must continuously force herself not to try fight them, but it’s clear they’ve been in place for a while. The muscle drugs must be helping, too, or she would expect to gag.

She is lying on her side, her head cushioned, her body strapped down at the neck, forehead, wrists, waist, knees and ankles into a loose kind of fetal position. Her left arm, the one lying against the padded table, is extended out and strapped in place for the sake of a needle drip. She can feel small discs tugging on her skin here and there as she breathes - as she _is_ breathed - like they’re glued to her, and senses the weight of curled cables running away from them to some kind of monitor somewhere. She tests her restraints weakly, and in the process discovers the final intrusions.

She is vaguely aware of the need to urinate, and the certainty that she’s unable to – but as little as she can move, she discovers a small stiff, irritating presence inside her that explains it. She has been catheterized. The nagging dripping sound she thinks she hears is coming from the other end of the tube inside her, and where it drains her into an unseen container somewhere. She has been catheterized before, the first time she was wounded - she didn’t enjoy it then either, but at least it’s some kind of familiar.

A thicker, more flexible tube is running up and deep into her for the rest of her waste – she can feel it hang out of her against the table. This is a new kind of violation. She tenses involuntarily around it and has to fight, again, against the urge to expel it. She already knows it wouldn’t work, even if she tried. It’s seated too deeply into her, deep enough that she can’t even visualize where it ends, and she’s too weak.

“It’s okay. Everything is fine. You're still healing, that's all. I’m going to let you open your eyes now, the lights are turned down, but be careful.”

She feels the tug of medical tape from her eyelids, and squints her eyes open. The light feels impossibly bright for a moment, and she blinks away at it. The strap around her forehead stops her turning to see Dani, but she recognizes the charts and notes pinned up against the wall of her quarters. It’s a surreally familiar detail. Dani strokes through locks of her hair gently, and she wonders how long it’s grown since she’s been out.

“We haven’t started bringing your sensory augmentations online yet. We'll do that gradually, when you’re further along. For now everything is about healing. Your implants are still grafting into your own body, and this stage can be unpredictable. Your muscles aren’t working the way you remember them, you won’t have control of them yet. That’s why the machine is breathing for you and it’s why you’re strapped down, so you can’t hurt yourself. We’ve been giving you drugs to stop you moving while you were out.”

Instinctively, she tries to signal she understands, but of course the tubes down her throat don’t allow for that. She can move her eyes just low enough to see the new scars on her hands in the dim light. If she concentrates, she can just about close her hands into weak fists.

It occurs to her that she’s naked. There’s a sheet draped over her pelvis and the tubes that leave her there, but otherwise she’s exposed to the air. She knows this room well, she’s even been naked here before, albeit under very different circumstances. She knows it’s strange not to feel cold in here, when she usually gripes about the hanging chill. Dani voices her thoughts for her.

“You’ve had fevers on and off while your body learns how to fix itself now. They’ve passed. You’ll run a few degrees hotter all the time from now on though.”

She strokes Grace’s right side, drawing along her ribs softly.

“I’m sorry for all this. I can’t imagine what it’s like. The medical techs would usually take care of you through this stage, in the recovery ward, but I didn’t want that for you. I’ll take care of you until you’re through it. I owe you a lot. We have a lot to talk about when you’re back on your feet.”

Whether it’s the sedation, or Dani’s comforting touch, she finds herself managing to relax a little despite the circumstances.

She knew, in the abstract, what it took to make somebody into an Augment, and she hadn’t fully expected to survive it. Few do. But she has, and she is as comfortable as she can be all things considered, with all these tubes and straps. She’s not in real pain, and she knows Dani will make good on her vow to care for her. This is what she signed up for.

Dani watches her closely as she runs this all through her mind. Grace is tall and powerful, and it’s been hard to see her like this while she was unconscious. Her long bare back, the straight line of her spine, has been making it painfully clear to Dani how deathly still she’s been lying this whole time.

“You saved my life,” Dani says, softly, still stroking the gentle contours of her bare side, examining already-familiar scars from what should have been mortal wounds. “They told me how close we were to losing you. But you don’t have to worry about anything else for now, I’ll take care of you.”

She wishes she could ask Dani to keep talking – it makes it easier to forget the machine breathing, to keep herself from trying to resist it. It makes it easier to forget the ache against her sinus from the feeding tube, the pitiless straps, and the ugly sensations of the catheter and the tube that feels like it’s pushed halfway into her gut, holding her unnaturally open.

“I need you to listen very carefully to me now, my love. This is important, do you understand?”

Grace can’t nod, but she tries and that’s enough. Dani comes around and kneels down so she’s at eye level, and talking right to her.

“Okay,” Dni says, stroking her hair again, “-The medics expect your recovery to take a few weeks. There are things I need to do for you in the meantime, to… feed you and clean you, that are uncomfortable. If you want, I can put you under for the rest of the time. If you want, you can be awake, and I’ll talk you through everything. From what they've seen with the other Augments, they tell me you’ll probably heal a little faster that way as you start getting used to your implants. But either way, I’ll be here taking care of you the whole time, I’m not going anywhere until you’re better. I will need to clean you inside and feed you now. Do you want to go under?”

Grace understands the warning Dani’s giving her. She thinks it over carefully.

She decides she has been unconscious long enough – she doesn’t want to lose any more time. She wants to be ready to fight again, as soon as she can. That’s what this was all for, wasn’t it? And she’s a soldier - she prefers to know the situation, and make her own assessments. She prefers to know how close Dani is.

Dani, she doesn’t like the idea of Dani seeing her like this, but it hardly makes any difference to her dignity by now – she’s relying on her the same way regardless. She won’t be doing anything for her she hasn’t been doing for days or even weeks already.

She makes the same awkward attempt to shake her head.

Dani strokes her head again, glad, and nods.

“Good girl. They said you were fearless during the ambush you know. I should have known nothing else could bother you now,” Dani says, and then adds more seriously “- I worried about you so much.”

Dani gives what she must think is a reassuring smile smile, and then moves behind her. Grace feels the tubes running from behind her move a little as something is prepared. Dani strokes along the profile of her hip and side gently, and folds the sheet forward off her.

“I’m going to pump some water and an agent into you in this little clear tube, and you’ll have to hold it for a while, then the machine will drain it out in the bigger black tube.”

Grace can’t see the tubes she means, but she understands the reassurance she’s trying to offer her. Clean water will pump into her; what’s pumped out will drain away unseen.

“I can’t give you another sedative so soon, but what’s left of your last dose should help. Are you ready?”

She would like to be able to take deep breaths to steady herself for what she knows is coming, but she can’t. The machine breathes into her, and it breathes out of her, as it likes. She looks straight ahead at the charts on the wall and gives an almost-nod.

“This won’t take long” Dani says, patting her hip.

Grace hears another mechanical sound start, a muffled pumping sound. She tenses a little as the mixture starts coming into her, but that’s all she can do, and it has little effect regardless. It’s warm, and the flow is gentle, but it’s steady, and soon she can feel a foreign pressure start blooming up inside her. It keeps coming, and she feels the pressure move further, deeper into her body. Like the breathing machine, she can do nothing to resist it – all she can do is will herself to adjust to it. It keeps coming, and if she could look to her belly she imagines she might see it swell.

The first cramp strikes, hard, and she jolts as violently as her deadened muscles will allow. Even with the drugs and restraints, she notices the first hints of her artificial new strength. Blunted as it is, it’s startling; now she understands the measures taken to keep her safe from herself.

Dani quickly moves her hand to her stomach, and starts massaging her deeply, working the water deeper and further into her. The cramps ease, but it’s a difficult experience, this sensation on top of the forced breathing, the catheter, the unfamiliar feel of an augmented body that hasn’t quite knitted all its parts together yet.

“Just a little longer. I know this isn’t easy, brave soldier.”

She can feel sweat beading on her naked skin. Even with Dani massaging the water into her, she feels, and must surely be showing, the strain of it all over. It keeps coming into her until she can’t imagine possibly taking anymore. And then it keeps coming anyway. Dani coos soft praise the whole time to keep her even, but there’s no mercy.

Finally, mercifully, she hears the pumping stop. She feels the fluid itself coming for a moment longer, and then it stops too. She feels impossibly full, and she feels the impotent, overpowering urge to be rid of it all, and only Dani’s constant comforting sounds and touches make it bearable.

“A little while more and then it’s all over. Just a little while. You’re doing so well, I know this is hard.”

It is. It’s very hard, and she hates it, hates that she has no control over any part of it. She is at least intensely grateful that it’s Dani here doing it for her, rather than some medic. Not because of embarrassment or anything like it - but because Dani is the only person in the world who can make her feel safe in a situation where she has no power of her own. Her whole body is currently depending on things outside it, on someone else. That person should be Dani.

The seconds crawl past, and she screws her eyes shut to stand it. Dani continues steadily massaging her stomach, by now just a comforting gesture rather than any practical relief. It feels like it lasts forever. If she didn’t _have_ to withstand it, she’s not sure she could.

“That’s good. That should be enough. I’m going to let the water out now.”

She feels the tubes out of her move again – Dani must be releasing some valve or something, because there’s an abrupt relief of pressure. She feels water run back out of her through the larger tube, and somehow this sensation is even stranger than having it pumped in, another thing happening to her body she cannot control, cannot affect at all.

“This is just water, and then we're done,” Dani says, as she is almost empty.

She hears the pumping start again, and then more water. It’s a little cooler, it doesn’t have whatever chemical was in the last batch, and it’s far easier to endure. Dani doesn’t ask her to hold it either, she lets it drain right back out almost immediately.

“That's all. I’m sorry, but it’s done now and we won’t need to do it again for a while. Thank you for being so patient,” Dani says, as if she had any choice. The sheet is folded back over her.

She hears Dani wash her hands carefully, and move some other things around. She comes back to the head of the padded table with a cool washcloth and a basin of clean water. She starts by softly padding Grace’s face with the cloth, and it’s the first pleasant sensation she’s had since she’s woken up. Dani moves around her with a basin, and sweeps the cloth over her skin gently everywhere she can. She rinses it out and changes the water more than once, and Grace gets the impression it's long since routine for her.

When she’s done, and there are more washing sounds, she comes back with some kind of squeezable bag of thin paste. She hangs it on the IV pole next to a near empty bag of fluids she must have used before she woke up.

“The finest cuisine human science still has to offer,” she says, apologetically, as she connects the bag to Grace’s stomach tube.

“You won’t be able to taste it, obviously, but I promise it’s delicious. It will be warm.”

She squeezes the paste down the tube a little, slowly enough that it won’t be a shock, and lets it run down the rest of the way. It’s another weird new feeling - the tube warms as the substance travels along it, down the back of her throat and directly into her stomach. She hadn’t felt hungry before, but she does feel herself get more comfortable as the food empties into her, so she must have been. She can’t taste anything, it’s true, but she does feel a sensation of good fullness.

When it’s finished, Dani strokes her hair and reconnects the tube to a fresh fluid bag.

“You need to eat a lot now,” she says, “- because your metabolism is fired way up. So we’ll have to do all this stuff a few times a day until you’re cleared. But like I say, I’ll be here the whole time. I can still put you under, if you want?”

She definitely considers it again before signalling a no. But no. Her mind is made up.

Dani nods, looking every inch the proud Commander-in-Chief as she stands up straight.

“Let’s get some good rest for now then, and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

Dani kisses her forehead and climbs carefully onto the padded table, avoiding tubes and cables. She takes one of Grace’s strapped hands, a risk – until her body's adjusted, until Grace has full control over her newly synthetic muscles and implants, they could seize without warning any second. But she owes Grace her life - she has given up her body so she can fight for her again, and the least Dani can offer her in return is some comfort.

“You’re not in any pain?”

A negative.

“Good. Tomorrow we’ll have to run some tests, and I’ve been thinking of some ways you might be able to communicate for the next few weeks. After that, I’m looking forward to hearing your voice again, so you can explain what exactly you were doing risking your dumb ass the way you did.”

The corner of Grace’s mouth twitches around the tube as she tries to smile.

Dani knows exactly why she did it though, and would do it again. She understands it completely, because she'd have done it too. Hell, even the techs who moved her in here must suspect it by now - the Commander of the whole resistance doesn’t play nursemaid for weeks for just any enlisted groudpounder, not even the Augment volunteers. But for a lover? Yes, perhaps then.

They fall gradually asleep together to the sound of the machine’s breathing. Silently, inorganic cells and synthetic fibres rebuild Grace’s body around her, into something as much machine as human. When they're finished, she’ll be stronger, faster and tougher - even more than she is in the dreams she's had of getting Dani to safety sooner at the South Tunnel.

For now she will trust Dani with her body entirely; it will all be worth it the day Dani can trust her with hers.


End file.
